by Billimarie

These past few days, I’ve been gaining speed on Halo 2…playing Xbox Live, playing with my brother and his friends, and ultimately sucking at it. I guess I’ve been getting slightly better, but not anything spectacular.

Halo 3 is AMAZING. I love the new weapons and how you can customize your players. You can even choose to be a female now ! ’bout time, Bungie.

My brother wasn’t allowed to go to the midnight opening (he’s 15) so I went by myself. Got to the mall and went to Gamestop at around 9 pm-ish…I got off of school at 8:30 pm. There was this relatively big line gathering up…I was one of the last people to actually be in line yet still be INSIDE the mall, everyone else had to wait outside as not to block off the exit. Here’s a few pictures…sorry some are so blurry, it was dark so I had to lower the exposure and thus get shaky images.

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By girl.

The boy’s choice for mixing sodas at a fountain: a mix of EVERYTHING, ALL MUST GO IN, MUST CONQUER SODA MACHINE

The girl’s choice: Lemonade plus maybe some Sprite? If that?

Actually, when I come across the juice dispensers, I typically don’t even get any of them because they are SO surgery and need to be watered down. Every now and then I go for the Cranberry + Lemonade combo. The other day I discovered fizzy water + Orange Juice = Orangina (CRAZY french website they have BTW). I will admit, it’s probably sorta rare to find *sparkling* water at a soda fountain dispenser, but if you can, or you have a selection of free bottled beverages (like at my FT job), mix the 2 for instant Orangina pleasure. I would go with about a 1:1 ratio, possible slightly more sparkling water. I’d also go with the Lemon flavored Perrier as well if you can.

If Orgina isn’t your thing, go for the juice isle at the g-store (I hope for your juice exploration sake it is a Trader Joes), and start mixing!

Enjoy!

p.s. Any good combos out there??

By girl.

So, I’ve been doing a fair amount of SKYPE-ing lately with some friends. I finally synced my bluetooth headset to my mac for this purpose as well (the ever so lovely Jawbone), but I’ve had a few issues with Skype insisting it knows what volume level THE SOUND OF MY VOICE should be. My friends on PC’s were like “oh, just go under tools, this menu thing, this, and un-check auto adjust volume.” No such luck for me on my Mac, even after I updated what version I had. A google seearch later and I found THIS FIX. It’s been MUCH better since then. Enjoy!!

By DecemberFall

I maintain that i’m a nerd I’m pretty darn nerdy and proud of it, just ask any of my friends. According to this test, i’m a light weight nerd. Guess the test just didn’t cover my kind of nerdy. But I mean I guess you can’t encompass all kinds of nerdy in a single test.

by Billimarie

You might want to read up on this, if you’re a woman playing in a man’s Xbox Live world.

Sad to say, but the world of online video/computer games is definitely a sexist one. I don’t think many people can argue against that claim; as soon as you enter a server with your gear and your speak into your mic, you’re targeted–unless, of course, you have that slick ‘prepubescent-boy-cracking’ voice going on.

You know the drill; you announce to the world through the tone of your voice that you’re female and suddenly you’re hit on. You’re targeted more than everyone else. You’re patronized. It’s pretty ridiculous, living in a 21st century world and still have things like this going on.

There are a lot of gaming communities for us female players out there…one of the most recent to get spotlighted is GamerChiX, an online group run by a woman named Christa Phillips. Phillips was inspired by the gamer group PMS Clan, a community dedicated to serving competitive online female gamers. If you’re a noob, or just at the amateur level, you might want to consider checking GamerChiX out.

To read the article printed by the Los Angeles Times, click on this link.
Even better, you can write to Alex Pham, the man who wrote the story, and send him a quick ‘thanks!’ for letting the public eye get a small glimps of the realities of a female gamer. (alex.pham@latimes.com)
Also, check out the GamerChiX myspace when you get a chance !

-b